Chapter Text
There is a symphony ringing in Wilbur Soot’s ears, one that has tormented him for far too long.
It starts like this: an experimental chord on his guitar, played thoughtfully as he sits cross-legged atop his proclaimed hot dog van, parked near a riverside on Dream’s vast lands. A chord, and a shooting star twinkling by overhead, and the barest spark of an idea.
An empire is its first form, its newborn inkling into existence, and as Wilbur strums another chord, it grows.
An empire becomes a nation, a nation becomes a dream, Dream becomes an enemy, and the faintest notes of piano chords join the song. And thus does the symphony begin, a wish and a hope and a conspiracy shared between brothers to draw out the beginning strains of a sonata, the first movement in all its unexpected, ragtag glory.
(He should have known, then, how it was going to end. He should have seen it coming. But really, who ever worries about the ending of a song when you have only just begun to play it?
And when was the ending ever the most important part, anyway?)
As a child, Wilbur longs to fly. He runs his fingers through his father’s feathers and goes to sleep every night praying he’ll wake up with his own pair of wings.
(He doesn’t.
He’s far older than he’ll ever admit before he manages to give up that particular dream.)
All his life, Wilbur looks up at the sky and aches, watches Phil take flight with a kind of jealous wonder. Climb ye higher and higher, some part of him whispers, rising on wings like eagles.
He clambers up to the topmost branches of trees in his brazen pursuit of the sun, of the stars, of the sky in its entirety. The limbs sway and dip and twist and Philza always frets, but Wilbur refuses to stop, even when one particularly slender switch cracks beneath his feet and sends him tumbling into his father’s lurching, panicked embrace.
If he can just keep climbing, surely he’ll find his own wings.
(Techno teaches him of an inventor, a creator, and Wilbur takes to calling Phil Daedalus like a fire to kindling. Phil is the inventor, building great walls and twisting mazes, monuments to all time—but Wilbur never once considered what it might mean to be Daedalus’ son.)
Some say life happens in the pauses, in the spaces between breaths, in the dark between stars and the seconds your eyes are closed in mid-blink. Music is just as much made up of silence as it is notes, and so too is life a series of freestanding parts, all divided and distinct in the sepia-tones of memory, but still whole, still connected.
Time, for Wilbur, feels divided into then and now, here and there, us and them—and yet everything is still connected, and he cannot rid himself of it, of the great and slow and terrible march that is time and life and the beating metronome of his symphony swimming in his ears. Even with walls and words and false smiles that hide the crumbling of his everything, Wilbur cannot separate himself from any of it.
A symphony is a thing of motion, of evershifting notes and harmonies—there’s a reason the parts are called movements, after all. And a movement is exactly what L’Manberg is.
(It’s Tommy who gives it a name, breathes firebright life into the dream that was Wilbur’s. The sparkle in his eye becomes the sharp-cut edges of Tommy’s wild grin, and a solo becomes a duet becomes so much more.)
A van by a river, a ragtag group of dreamers with blackstone in hand and dandelion dye smeared across their palms, a star-spangled sky above as the witness to their whispers of revolution and freedom—this is L’Manberg. This is their sonata form, the beginning of it all.
Here is how it starts: a shooting star, an impossible dream, a half-joking name laughed at in the dead of night.
Here is how it continues: the melody unspools ever onwards, looping around itself to become two. First there is Wilbur, quiet and lyrical, and then there is Tommy, loud and forceful, and then there is everything that follows after as they drive the revolution onwards.
There is a van, and then walls, and then still taller walls. There is a forest fire that scorches the redwoods, doused with buckets of seawater. There are demands for surrender, declarations of independence and war alike, and then there is war itself, and it is an ugly, ugly thing.
Exposition precedes development becomes recapitulation, and soon enough five chattering revolutionaries shove and stumble into a tiny blackstone room. One traitor emerges, not yet haunted by the screams of her friends, not yet knowing about the strict limit placed on life.
They are nearing the end now, broken and bloodied, singed and stretched, quieter in the aftermath of their friend’s betrayal, but the melody is still the same, recognizable in the flinty look in Wilbur’s eyes, the brassy courage in Tommy’s voice.
“You and me,” he says to Dream, steel in his spine. “Bow duel. Ten paces.”
Dream, surprisingly, agrees.
It is not so surprising when Wilbur’s hand falls on the count of ten and Dream’s arrow strikes home just to the left of the center of Tommy’s forehead.
(Wilbur clutches Tommy’s corpse to his chest and screams himself hoarse, even after the respawn has kicked in. The arrow clatters hollowly to the bloodstained planks and he snatches it up, gripping it until it snaps in half, plunging splinters deep into his palm.)
The real surprise in the end is that the duel is not the end of all things, not like they thought.
Tommy limps determinedly back to face Dream and makes a deal, the discs for their freedom (Tommy’s prized possessions for Wilbur’s dreams), and when the sun rises over the smoking remains of L’Manberg, it rises over a land that is truly free.
This is how the sonata form ends: four brethren stand atop a battered hot dog van and crow with delight as Wilbur cheerfully tells Dream to suck it with none of his usual eloquence but all of the life in his lungs.
Where the first movement closes with a fanfare and a crash, the second begins slow and quiet, the lull before the storm. First there is the clamor of war, and then soft footsteps towards freedom, towards healing.
(Or so they thought.)
It is the quiet shuffle of tattered uniforms as the four of them—Wilbur, Tommy, Tubbo, Fundy—clamber atop the Camarvan and watch the sun spill over the horizon on their second day of freedom. It’s the way they work into the heat of the afternoon, terraforming and repairing the walls, before splashing into the icy river water in a tangle of limbs and laughter, shucking off their hats and coats to play in this land they’ve carved for a home.
It’s slow and lyrical and honeysweet, summer berries and buttercups, songbird laughter as Niki joins their ranks, Jack Manifold’s raucous presence.
For a good long while, things are okay. The chorus is made up of the sounds of Wilbur’s guitar, chiming hymns in Church Prime, Niki’s humming, slow and sweet, in her seaside bakery. Tommy teaches Fundy piano, and Tubbo strums his ukulele by the riverside.
It feels like things could stay this way forever.
(In a different world, perhaps they did.)
In a kinder world, Wilbur does not stoop and tremble beneath the weight of his self-imposed burdens—or when he does, there are others there to catch him.
In this one, Wilbur is excellent at hiding his struggles, and so the tension builds and the violins screech just so and it all leads up into a breaking point.
The Election.
He thought—well. Wilbur’s not sure what he thought, actually, or even if he even thought anything at all. It was less logic and more emotion that spurred this decision onwards.
He doesn't have to hold an election. Hell, he doesn't even need to.
He's the damn president already, and no one has challenged him on it.
(But as Wilbur has learned oh so very well, far more goes on behind closed doors than he could ever be aware of. People turn and whisper to each other as he passes them on the streets, and he’s not so sure those whispers mean anything good.
The paperwork piles up. Dream barely gives him the time of day in diplomatic negotiations. Phil sends him a letter that hardly makes it past a few lines.
No one believes in him.
And why should they? he thinks bitterly to himself, digging the heels of his hands into stinging eyes as his candle burns down late into the night. I’ve done nothing to earn this.)
Things could have stayed the way they were, but one late summer evening, Wilbur finds himself sitting atop the Camarvan, staring across this land that doesn’t feel rightfully his, and he thinks I should change this.
The salt from the breeze off the sea stings his nostrils, lingers on his tongue with the faint smoke from the crackling netherrack at his back.
There is no shooting star to wish on this time. There is only Wilbur and his jumbled, messy thoughts.
He thinks of impossible dreams, of his achingly bare and empty back, thinks of branches creaking beneath his feet in his pursuit of
(the sky? the world? his people’s support? his father’s pride?)
something, anything with meaning, and his hands curl into fists in his lap.
An election, Wilbur thinks. We’ll hold an election.
The next day, he goes to find Tommy.
(Beneath his too-eager feet, the switch splinters and cracks. His father is not there to catch him this time.
Little bird, little bird, will you finally learn to fly? Or will your father watch you as you fall?)
The third movement sweeps in, courtly and refined, and all of L’Manberg is hapless in its wake. In three-quarter time, Wilbur watches his world collapse.
(In an echoing ravine painfully absent of song, Tommy watches his brother crumble.)
One-two-three are the parties for the Election—and oh, that’s where things start to go so terribly wrong, an endorsement turned enemy, old friend turned opponent.
One-two-three go the beats of his heart as he reads the results with steady voice and shaking hands. One-two-three and the world falls apart.
Between one breath and another, they are exiled, and then there is an arrow striking him in the throat, water and blood in his lungs and Tommy’s screaming in his ears, and then there isn’t another breath to exhale, not until he lurches awake at spawn, fingers clawing at his now-intact throat, and then, and then—
And then his son is tearing down the walls.
(Watch your country crumble, watch your dreams die.)
Tubbo works for Schlatt. Fundy disowns him.
They send a letter to Techno and he comes without question. When Wilbur picks up his quill to pen a letter to Phil from the depths of a cold and dusty ravine, he hesitates for only a moment before he begins writing.
(He lies.)
It spirals onwards, downwards, and Wilbur, ever the elegant showman, twists misery into poetry, horror into drama, acting out a pantomime death in shadow puppets on the ravine walls. The others think there is hope, yet. They believe in him, or so they claim. His lip curls at the thought. He picks his nails ‘til they bleed, smokes cigarettes until all he can taste is ash on the back of his tongue.
It’s a farce of a rebellion, really, so he might as well spice things up.
In five words, he makes his decision. Let me be your vassal.
In three heartbeats, Wilbur reaches out a hand to join Dream’s waltz of destruction.
(The enemy of my enemy is my friend, my partner in crime, my false god and my patron saint.)
The Festival arrives, marked by a brilliant autumn canopy and pumpkins ripening on their vines. Wilbur spies an apple-bobbing game as he creeps like a rat at the edges of the festivities.
He can’t recall quite what apples taste like. All they’ve eaten in Pogtopia for weeks and weeks are damned potatoes. They’re nothing but hot mush to him, mealy and miserable beneath the smoke-taint lurking behind his teeth. Nothing can quite overcome the acrid sweetness of burnt soul-sand that coats his tongue.
Manberg's Festival, as anyone with a lick of sense or a healthy dose of paranoia might have guessed, comes to a bloody, explosive end.
The crackle of fireworks still rings in Wilbur’s ears as he stands on the grounds, staring up in disbelief at Schlatt, flanked by George and Quackity like a cartoon villain with his henchmen.
“You actually let him do that,” Schlatt crows, a malicious grin curling over his mouth, smooth and icy as whiskey on the rocks.
(Somewhere Wilbur cannot see him, Techno’s hands are coated in gunpowder as they hold a crossbow in their unsteady grasp.)
Numbly, Wilbur wonders, Did I?
Is this all my fault?
And he’s the villain, isn’t he? Or he’s supposed to be, anyway. So maybe it is.
They leave the Festival at a sprint, and as the adrenaline runs its course through his veins, Wilbur feels a heady kind of relief.
He was right. He was right.
No one is actually on his side. No one cares.
Wilbur was right.
(It’s a cruel comfort in a world where Tommy’s eyes are red with angry tears and Niki descends into Pogtopia with shaking legs, where Tubbo walks toe-heel toe-heel with fresh dye-splattered scars carving across his face.
Wilbur cannot look at Tubbo without his chest tightening. He tells himself it’s just the faint reek of burning human flesh that he cannot get out of his nostrils. He’s not sure if he believes himself.)
The Pit is almost worse than the Festival, because this time, Wilbur can’t bring himself to care. There’s nothing but hollow bitterness consuming his chest, eating him from the inside out, devouring his heart and clawing at his stomach, and even the fight he jeers onwards does nothing to satisfy it.
“Punch him!” Wilbur crows. “Kill him!”
The words are revoltingly sweet on his tongue.
You weren’t meant for this, whispers a voice that sounds like his faintest memories of his mother. This life was not supposed to be for you.
He ignores it, tries to gorge himself on the drama, the violence, anything to fill the emptiness.
It doesn’t work.
Techno wins, leaving Tommy crumpled and bleeding on the stony floor with a declaration of it stays in the pit and violence is the only universal language.
(Wilbur sits hunched on his bed later that night and wonders what it all meant, what the fight had been trying to say.
He doesn’t think it meant anything. It makes him vaguely sick.)
Though he does not know it, here is how the waltz ends: trios stand at odds, one-two-three one-two-three one-two-three, Wilbur-Dream-Techno, Schlatt-George-Quackity, Tommy-Tubbo-Niki.
The music fades with a gentle flourish, partners drifting, splitting, spiraling to the frantic beat of hearts, and elsewhere, there are wingbeats.
INTERLUDE, ASIDE: It is the day after the Festival, Wilbur has found the button, and the timing is perfect. Everything has fallen into place.
He enters the button room, the stage for his last great soliloquy, spotlight of glowstone already centered neatly over the innocuous wooden button set in the far wall. This is not the first time Wilbur has been here, but he hopes to a god he does not believe in that it will be his last.
There is only one flaw in Wilbur’s plan—or two, depending on how you view it. Quackity and Tommy stand at his back, staring in horror, and Wilbur’s showmanship really is his downfall. He tries to make everything beautiful and dramatic and pleasing, something that will endure in people’s memories for a long time to come, and one cannot deliver a heart-wrenching monologue if there is no one to hear it, after all.
He did this. He invited them here.
He will live to regret it.
They block him into a corner, and Wilbur claws at the cobble unceasingly, even when the skin on his fingers bruises and tears and blood runs freely down his hands.
“Give me a reason!” Wilbur demands, almost desperate. He’s lost a fingernail and broken two more.
“This isn’t the right thing to do!” Tommy yells back at him, throwing his weight onto the cobble from the other side, trying to keep Wilbur at bay.
Wilbur keeps scrabbling at the rocks, palms slippery with his own blood, sweat stinging his brow. They’re both babbling, saying something about the right thing and this isn’t the right button to press and you can’t fucking do this, Wilbur!
“It’s not fair, Wilbur,” Tommy spits, piling more obstacles in Wilbur’s way, and Wilbur wants to laugh, at that.
Fairness is a bullshit concept. Nothing in life is fair.
Was it fair that L’Manberg was given nothing but trouble from the very beginning, when it was merely supposed to be a place of freedom? Was it fair that Tommy had to give up his discs to secure their independence? Was it fair that Tubbo died at the Festival because Wilbur put him directly in harm’s way?
(Is it fair that he’ll never be able to fly like his father can?)
“I’m going to press it,” he says, gasping for air, wiping hair out of his eyes and leaving streaks of blood smeared on his forehead. “I’m going to press it and we’re going to run out of here.”
His tongue curls around that we, feeling the weight of the lie between his teeth.
Tommy rounds the heap of stone to peer at him through the opening, brows scrunched and eyes fierce with determination. He reaches into his inventory and hurls the TNT he removed from where Wilbur had placed it back onto the floor.
“If you press that button,” Tommy hisses, “you go down with it.”
I know, sings Wilbur in his head, his heart, his veins. I know, I know, I know. That was always the bloody plan.
“I just want to end it,” he implores, a half-giddy, half-panicked laugh escaping him. “I just want to press it.”
Tommy’s eyes flash with something Wilbur can’t quite decipher, and suddenly, he’s taking off his armor, jerking at the straps with quick, aborted movements. Quackity and Wilbur watch him with confusion.
“If you press that button,” Tommy repeats, staring Wilbur down hard enough to make him squirm in his little stone box, “we die with you.”
Quackity, though terrified, sets his jaw and sheds his own armor, tilting his chin up in defiance.
This is not how things were supposed to go.
This is not the script Wilbur has played out in his head a dozen times over, each and every time he’s been in this goddamn room, slumped on the chair in the gloom, staring at the illuminated button on the craggy wall.
Tommy always was better at improv, he supposes.
It’s not fair, Tommy had said. Wilbur agrees.
In the end, he can’t do it. Simple as that.
“You love it, don’t you, Tommy?” he asks wearily, staring past his right-hand man to look at a scrawl of My L’Manberg on the wall. “You love L’Manberg.”
Tommy’s nod flashes in his periphery.
“Yes.”
(Here is a secret: Wilbur is asking the wrong question. Tommy is giving the right answer. Neither of them realize.)
He tells them about Chekov’s gun. Neither Tommy nor Quackity understand what he’s trying to say, but it’s not as if he expected anyone to understand anyway. It was a shot in the dark—and what a metaphor choice that is, he thinks wryly—but they’ll see soon enough.
Wilbur puts on the armor like Tommy asks, and when his brother and Quackity exit the tiny room, he lingers long enough to sing snatches of the anthem while reaffixing the button to the wall.
Tommy will understand, surely.
It’s just how stories work, how symphonies progress. The finale must be grand, and it has to come eventually.
(We can still take it back, Tommy pleads, and Wilbur wishes with every bone in his body that he could believe what Tommy says is true.
The long and short of it is that Wilbur is not a bird—for all his miserable underground suffocation, he is no canary—and he has no wishbone to break. Perhaps if he had the wings he so desired, he could excavate it from his own chest, cut himself open and carve it out, crack it with his own two hands, gory and grisly and raw.
But Wilbur is wingless, and Wilbur has run out of wishes.
There are no shooting stars or wishbones here, and Wilbur cannot believe in Tommy the same way Tommy believes in him.)
At long last, the finale—the climax of it all.
It is the sixteenth of November, and Wilbur Soot knows to his bones that someone will die today. He rather fancies he knows exactly who it will be.
It’s fast and furious, rollicking with the clash of swords, the twang of bowstrings, battle and shouts all around. There are moments where it slows, of course—fermatas and ritardandos in the form of a talk with Tommy, a fox for Niki, a motley crew gathering in the moldering ruins of the Camarvan to mock a pathetic tyrant’s final moments. There’s one long minute where Wilbur’s coat catches fire during the heat of battle and he finds himself staring at it in a sick kind of fascination until the heat begins to lick at his calves.
(He wonders what would have happened if he let it keep burning. If anyone would have been able to save him. If he might have stepped up to the ramparts of the tower and let himself tip over, plunge to his death in smoking metaphor.
Wilbur douses it, in the end. He’s not quite finished.)
They win.
They win and they celebrate and Wilbur gives it to Tommy gives it to Wilbur gives it to Tubbo, like playing hot potato with their nation is going to solve everything, turn it back into what it was supposed to be. Tommy speaks of Chekov’s gun, and Wilbur’s throat tightens. Tubbo speaks of damages and hope, and Wilbur hangs his head.
It doesn’t stop him, in the end.
“I’ll be back,” he promises, slipping away. It is one of the few promises Wilbur Soot has no intention of keeping.
The thing I built this nation for doesn’t exist anymore! he shouts to no one, to the omniscient chorus, to a nonexistent heavenly host. It’s over.
(Not quite.)
Phil finds him in the button room, the last echoes of his own words ringing in his ears. Wilbur can’t find it in himself to be surprised. It’s the climax, after all—what could be better than the prodigal son reuniting with his father?
But there will be no fine robe nor fattened calf for Wilbur. There is only the trigger, sweat-slicked beneath his finger. There is only Wilbur and the button on the wall.
“There was a special place,” Wilbur says desperately, “where men could go, but, but it’s not there anymore.”
“It is there,” Phil tells him gently, and something in Wilbur crumples.
You’re not getting it. None of you are getting it.
“They’re fighting,” he tells Phil.
Something Tubbo told him echoes in his ears with the ringing explosions of fireworks beyond the walls of the button room, his ark, his haven, his tomb—doomed to forever fight.
They are, aren’t they? No matter how many times they say words over weapons, no matter how many wars they win or lose, no matter how many lives lost and homes destroyed, they always come back to the fighting.
It’s their rondo form, really, Wilbur muses, their rhythm and rhyme. A-B-A-C-A-D-A. No matter what comes in between, it always comes back to this, to that one damned line, doesn’t it?
“There was a saying, Phil, by a traitor,” Wilbur says, the words tasting like relief on his tongue. He does not think of Eret’s joy when Tommy proclaimed L’Manberg meant to be. “A traitor, I don’t know if you’ve heard of Eret?”
(Phil hasn’t, he knows, because Wilbur is a liar and none of his letters to Phil told the whole, honest truth. But his father knows him well enough to realize what is happening, and Wilbur smiles sadly to see the dawning understanding in his eyes.)
He raises his hand in shaking salute.
“It was never meant to be.”
(When Wilbur is young, Techno teaches him of Daedalus, but he never mentions an Icarus. Years later, standing before his father in a room blown open with wings of sun and smoke at his back, Wilbur thinks he understands why.)
Here is how the symphony ends: Wilbur throws down his sword and begs for his father to end it, kill me, kill me Phil.
Tears slice tracks through the gray coating of rock dust on Wilbur’s face.
Phil’s cheeks are dry and his hands are shaking.
He does something he will regret forever, then. He does as his son asks, and drives the sword into Wilbur’s heart.
Wilbur has no wings to melt and no ocean to swallow him, but he doesn’t need symbolism nor myth, just his father’s arms around him one last time.
I finished, Wilbur thinks, as the world goes black and fuzzy at the edges, as Phil weeps and Techno seethes and Tommy screams. My great finished symphony.
And then he falls.